Today, with the release of Jakarta EE 8, we’ve entered a new era in Java innovation.
Under an open, vendor-neutral process, a diverse community of the world’s leading Java organizations, hundreds of dedicated developers, and Eclipse Foundation staff have delivered the Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform, Web Profiles, and related TCKs, as well as Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 certified as a Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation.
To say this a big deal is an understatement. With 18 different member organizations, over 160 new committers, 43 projects, and a codebase of over 61 million lines of code in 129 Git repositories, this was truly a massive undertaking — even by the Eclipse community’s standards. There are far too many people to thank individually here, so I’ll say many thanks to everyone in the Jakarta EE community who played a role in achieving this industry milestone.
Here are some of the reasons I’m so excited about this release.
For more than two decades, Java EE has been the platform of choice across industries for developing and running enterprise applications. According to IDC, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Java for mission-critical workloads. Jakarta EE 8 gives software vendors, more than 10 million Java developers, and thousands of enterprises the foundation they need to migrate Java EE applications and workloads to a standards-based, vendor-neutral, open source enterprise Java stack.
As a result of the tireless efforts of the Jakarta EE Working Group’s Specification Committee, specification development follows the Jakarta EE Specification Process and Eclipse Development Process, which are open, community-driven successors to the Java Community Process (JCP) for Java EE. This makes for a fully open, collaborative approach to generating specifications, with every decision made by the community — collectively. Combined with open source TCKs and an open process of self-certification, Jakarta EE significantly lowers the barriers to entry and participation for independent implementations.
The Jakarta EE 8 specifications are fully compatible with Java EE 8 specifications and include the same APIs and Javadoc using the same programming model developers have been using for years. The Jakarta EE 8 TCKs are based on and fully compatible with Java EE 8 TCKs. That means enterprise customers will be able to migrate to Jakarta EE 8 without any changes to Java EE 8 applications.
In addition to GlassFish 5.1 (which you can download here), IBM’s Open Liberty server runtime has also been certified as a Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation. All of the vendors in the Jakarta EE Working Group plan to certify that their Java EE 8 implementations are compatible with Jakarta EE 8.
All of this represents an unprecedented opportunity for Java stakeholders to participate in advancing Jakarta EE to meet the modern enterprise’s need for cloud-based applications that resolve key business challenges. The community now has an open source baseline that enables the migration of proven Java technologies to a world of containers, microservices, Kubernetes, service mesh, and other cloud native technologies that have been adopted by enterprises over the last few years.
As part of the call to action, we’re actively seeking new members for the Jakarta EE Working Group. I encourage everyone to explore the benefits and advantages of membership. If Java is important to your business, and you want to ensure the innovation, growth, and sustainability of Jakarta EE within a well-governed, vendor-neutral ecosystem that benefits everyone, now is the time to get involved.
Also, if you’re interested in learning more about our community’s perspective on what cloud native Java is, why it matters so much to many enterprises, and where Jakarta EE technologies are headed, download our new free eBook, Fulfilling the Vision for Open Source, Cloud Native Java. Thank you to Adam Bien, Sebastian Daschner, Josh Juneau, Mark Little, and Reza Rahman for contributing their insights and expertise to the eBook.
Finally, if you’ll be at Oracle Code One at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week, be sure to stop by booth #3228, where the Eclipse community will be showcasing Jakarta EE 8, GlassFish 5.1, Eclipse MicroProfile, Eclipse Che, and more of our portfolio of cloud native Java open source projects.
